(upbeat music)
- [Woman] One of the things that
I usually try to get people to
understand is that there's still so much to explore.
There's still so much that we don't know about
the life on our planet.
And so that's a really important thing,
I think for people to understand.
- [Man] Well, nowadays,
the techniques for collecting specimens is much better
than it was back a hundred years ago.
In many ways it's fairly similar.
But nowadays we have ways of bringing those specimens up and
fixing them and preserving them so that they will be stable
till they get back to the museum.
- [Woman] These specimens
are preserved for scientific research now
and in the future,
I think a lot of times people just think
about the here and now,
and don't think about what might be important for study
a hundred or 150 or 300 years from now.
Just because the timescale that we live on is so fast.
- [Adam] So the Museum of Comparative Zoology, in my mind,
is just what the name implies.
Zoology, the study of animals.
Comparative, we're comparing animals here in the museum.
And that varies from sponges, to corals,
to birds, to different types of mammals,
to snakes, all different types of animals.
And so, the MCZ to me is a natural history museum
that houses diverse biodiverse,
the types of animals that you find all over the world.
We're a museum for comparing animals
to be used by researchers from all over the world,
to be seen by the young students
that come from different classes and schools,
to people who have come back to the museum year
after year, after year,
just to see the different animals
that we have on display and on exhibit.
- [Jennifer] My name is Jennifer Winifred Trimble,
and I'm a Curatorial Assistant.
And you are here at the Museum of Comparative Zoology
within invertebrate zoology,
and we are in the ground floor of the collections space.
We act as a repository for biological samples
that are preserved in a variety of ways
so that researchers and zoologists can come
and study what we have in our holdings for their research,
either across timescale
or to look at variation amongst species.
Nautilus will either use a slab or a grab
to sample these specimens aboard ship,
bring them up from the sea floor
and then preserve them in containers,
which are then shipped
to invertebrate zoology here at the MCZ.
Things that are collected aboard ship
are put directly into the preservation type
that they stay in here.
And that's of paramount importance to what we do
because the less transition you have from preservation type,
the longer that the specimen will last in storage,
and we want things to last indefinitely.
And so, the better you prepare them on ship,
the easier it is to transition them to the museum here.
We generally get them packed up into boxes,
and they come in either Falcon tubes
or heat sealed bags, with the sample code
on the outside of the vile.
Samples can be preserved in a variety of ways.
Some of them are within ethanol.
Some of our specimens are preserved on microscope slides,
and those would be things like tissue samples
or even small pieces of coral.
And we also have things that are preserved dry,
and those are either in this area or in a separate room.
- [Adam] We're in the building called
the Northwest building.
So this building this room that we're in,
is most suitable for housing dry preserved specimens.
What is going on now today is unprecedented in terms of the
type of material that we're getting back,
in terms of the condition and the way it's preserved.
So, we all can make estimates
of how many specialists we have in the museum.
And I think the estimates are somewhere
around 21 million specimens.
These are specimens that are important,
to people who are trying to understand biodiversity
and tried to make some decisions about these areas that are,
that are in the world where these
particular animals that are found.
And so this is why cruises and expeditions like the Nautilus
go into areas where people haven't been to,
or haven't been to in a very long time.
So now we're continuing to document what is in those areas.
- [Jennifer] The next step is to then database these,
and they're put into our online repository,
which is called MCZ base.
It's a publicly available database.
They're given catalog numbers
to keep track of each individual sample.
And then uploaded to this online database
so that researchers can access them on the Internet.
- [Vanessa] So, it's not always practical or possible
to just go out and say,
I'm gonna collect more of this material.
So, having specimens in museums
is incredibly important.
And in terms of curation,
that's incredibly important because you need the material
to be in a condition that is useful to research.
You know, it's hard to know what you don't know, always,
but it's even sometimes difficult to know what we do know.
And that comes into trying to understand everything,
all the science that has happened
before you came along as a scientist.
So, you have to go back through literature
that might date back to the 1700s.
So, it is fundamentally important to have access
to the literature and repositories like this library,
for example,
they're very important.
This is something that I have been sequencing
as part of my research on other snails and slugs
in a different group.
The purple blob or the purple orb was exciting
because it was a very beautiful shade of purple.
And it was illuminated when the lights were on it.
Ideally, when you're describing a new species,
you want to have as many specimens of that as possible,
because that will be the only way
that you can get a sense of variation in that species.
But at the same time,
it was enough to put it in one of my analysis
and confirm that it is in fact,
a velutinid snail rather than a pleurobranch,
which is in the group that I actually
work on most of the time.
When one particular species gets hyped up, it's good.
We obviously want people to get excited about biology and
about specimens, but at the same time,
researchers that might be interested in these specimens are
working on a lot of other things.
And sometimes there are other things that are a bit more
pressing in terms of their current research or, you know,
what grants they might have.
- [Adam] We have many, many specimens
that just sit on our shelves that are uncataloged,
that haven't been actually entered into our database.
We know that it's a sponge.
We know that it's a nautilus brutal star.
We know that it's a, a gastropod of some sort,
but to be able to take the time and they have the knowledge
to figure out exactly what species that is,
it requires a lot of expertise.
And this is where we are calling out for other researchers
from outside of the museum,
to use our specimens for their research.
So we've been working with the Nautilus team to identify
these people who may be interested in working on these
particular animals by putting names on them.
Now we can document where animals
are found in this world of biodiversity,
and understanding what our animals are found in
those particular areas.
And that's really what we do here.
That's the purpose of our museum,
is to document biodiversity.
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